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Asked by to Alan, Deepak, Francesca, Lilly, Nick on 17 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by lovetodance333.
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Alan Fitzsimmons answered on 17 Mar 2014:
Jupiter is the bigger planet in our Solar system, there are planets around other stars that are 14 times more massive.
The largest star in our galaxy may be one called UY Scuti, which has a diameter about 1700 times the diameter of our Sun, but we’re not sure. It can be hard to measure the size of stars, even really big ones, so there’s a bit of uncertainty there! And we can only do it accurately in our galaxy, there could be bigger ones out there.
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Francesca Day answered on 18 Mar 2014:
It’s quite hard to measure the size of planets and stars in other solar systems, so we’re not quite sure! We do know that their are stars much bigger than our sun, and planets much bigger than Jupiter though!
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Nick Wright answered on 18 Mar 2014:
The biggest planet in our Solar System is Jupiter but we know of many other planets around other stars that are larger than Jupiter. In fact we’re not entirely sure what the difference is between the largest planets and the smallest stars – they just look very similar!
The largest star known is a red supergiant called VY Canis Majoris, which is a similar size to other really massive stars such as UY Scuti and W26 (which I discovered!). These stars are all very massive stars that have reached the ends of their lives and inflated to be really large as they become unstable and die.
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